Work Text:
'He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you
but he thinks
this is a lie, so he says in the end
you’re dead, nothing can hurt you
which seems to him
a more promising beginning, more true.' - 'A Myth of Devotion'
When Jaime finally comes – too late, far too late – he finds her in the throne room.
She supposes it fits. The throne with its twisted and melded swords has always been the silent third in their relationship, as solid and ever-present as any man or woman could be. For as long as she can remember, it has cast its shadow over their love, a looming reminder more powerful and tempting than a brute such as Robert Baratheon. If Cersei is honest, the thought of it had seduced her far more than any daydream of even the beautiful Rhaegar Targaryen could.
And today, she sits upon the throne itself, the ultimate prize that had always been denied to her by mere virtue of her sex; instead she had been forced to settle for the lower, smaller throne that has always been designated for the queen. As a girl, she had spent hours imagining herself upon the Iron Throne, dispensing justice at the absence of her lord and king as she had seen her own father do. She had assumed that Queen Rhaella was too weak, too beaten-down by her mad husband to rule in his stead, until her father had told her that only a king and his Hand may sit upon the throne itself. Even now, she can remember Lord Tywin’s voice, an odd mixture of sharp rebuke for a girl with dreams better suited for a man, and fatherly pride for a daughter with ambitions befitting the power and majesty of her house.
But her father is dead, and the kingdom has fallen, so Cersei sits on the throne.
There is a thrill of pride that the blades do not cut through her tender skin, and a smile curls over her lips as she lightly, easily, runs her palm over the arm of the chair. She only hopes that the fabled Dragon Queen is torn to ribbons as penance for her crimes when she sits for the first time.
Cersei knows quite a bit about penance.
She does not rise when Jaime enters, and he hesitates just inside the door, his eyes dragging from her head, hair still so short from when it was shorn, along the familiar plains of her face, so like his own but sharpened by hunger, down the pale, thin body garbed in an ill-fitted gown. I am not the queen he remembers, as he is not the knight I knew, she thinks, and she finds an odd sort of comfort that they have come to such mutual ruin.
His eyes drop to the child in her arms – the real reason, she knows, that she does not bleed, for she may be a mere widowed consort queen upon the throne, but she holds the sweet king in her arms, as peaceful and still as though he were simply sleeping. At the sight of Tommen, she sees Jaime draw a breath in through clenched teeth, and he tries to hide it as he balks – as though he could ever hide anything from her, even once in his life. His shrinking away sets a spark of anger aflame in her – that he should dare to cringe from the son that had come from them both, and yet been solely hers in life, as though Jaime’s pain is anything more than a candle beside her inferno.
Once she might have thought that her own sorrows had simply bled into his body, as she breathed out and he breathed in, skin but a thin barrier between one person split into two bodies by a cruel act of fate.
She knows better, now.
“I would not let them do to my poor sweet boy what they did to my daughter,” she says, and her voice is tremulous and high, despite her best efforts to keep it steady. The council, meager and cowering as it may be in most matters, had made no effort to shield her from the truth nor to soften the blow. At one time she would have appreciated such a thing – words are a woman’s weapon, and Cersei wields them with the same skill Jaime shows with his blade.
But she had been unable to hold back her anguished tears when they told her how the Dornish slaughtered Myrcella, how they wrapped her in a golden cloak and laid her at the feet of the Dragon Queen. The mad queen’s abomination, they had called her daughter, and Cersei had laughed uncontrollably, laughed and screamed all at once, for had they so easily forgotten that their precious savior was herself the daughter of a brother and sister?
Cersei had been pushed into her rooms then, whispers of mad, she’s gone mad echoing off the cold stone walls. Absurdly, Cersei had remembered Catelyn Stark in that moment, and had asked herself when does grief slide into madness?
When she had been left alone, all but forgotten as though she were not still a queen, she had tried to bring the scene to mind, her girl wrapped in a golden shroud, just as the witch had promised once. But all she could recall had been Myrcella as a child, beautiful and bright-eyed; she could not imagine her little princess on the cusp of womanhood, all long colt-like limbs, and could not bring into focus those imperfections she had never seen – the missing ear, the hideous scar said to run the length of her face.
Even now, even with her last child wrapped in her arms, it is far easier to bring to conjure up the face of Daenerys Targaryen. Though Cersei had never laid eyes on the girl herself, her shade had haunted Cersei’s every step for years upon years (until there comes another, younger and more beautiful, to cast you down and take all that you hold dear), a nameless, faceless phantom for so long. She imagines the Dragon Queen must resemble her long-dead brother, silver-haired and pale and almost ethereal in her loveliness. She imagines that beautiful visage twisting into a pleased sneer at the sight of the little lioness laid at her feet, and Cersei holds Tommen’s still body closer.
In the end, it had been so easy - a few clear drops in a glass of warm milk. She had held him in her lap as his brilliant green eyes clouded over with sleep and then fell shut, as he nuzzled against the crook of her neck and drew his last few breaths. Slowly. Painlessly.
She shall never have my last child, my little king.
Jaime pauses, and in his eyes, in the tension of his body, Cersei can see him map the battle in his mind. She could laugh at the sight, her brother pretending to be a knight still with his once glorious sword hand now heavy and immobile, the poorest use of gold that she has ever seen. She could laugh, at the cautious calculation in his eyes, at the idea that they find themselves now on opposite ends of the battlefield.
For she would rather laugh than scream.
“Have you forsaken me, brother?” she asks, hating the way the words come out, high and wavering, and she pulls Tommen’s tiny form closer. His cheek is cool now, when it presses against the hollow of her throat. (And when your tears have drowned you…)
Cersei refuses to weep, even now, even as she feels the tears hot and thick at the back of her throat. She learned long ago to bite her tongue to stay the pain rather than show weakness, and she does not forget her lessons. A queen does not cry. A lioness does not weep.
If I do not cry, I will not drown.
Jaime takes a step closer, his heavy booted footsteps echoing around the empty hall, and Cersei wonders if the throne room has ever before been so empty and silent. Is this how it was all those years ago, when her twin had driven his sword through a mad king? No, she decides, for if it were this quiet, how would he have ever gotten close enough to plunge his blade? This moment must belong to them alone, so like the eerie stillness just before the break of a new dawn, the kind that she would watch from her window at Casterly Rock as a girl.
Jaime’s eyes glint, brilliant as the jewels that once adorned her gowns, bright as the gleam off his farce of a hand. “Why would I? Do you truly think Queen Daenerys would suffer me to live, sweet sister?” he asks. “I may be less of a man than I was all those years ago, but I remain the man who slew her father, I’m sure you’ll remember.”
“Surely Lady Sansa offered you asylum, as thanks for your good service,” Cersei sneers. A queen to the north and a queen to the south, and I know not yet which I should fear. Sometimes the phantom in her nightmares still takes the shape of the little dove, innocent and fragile as a winter rose in bloom. Cersei had been so certain, for so long, and had thought to change the course of fate by wedding the little Stark girl to her imp brother, yet it had been her other brother, her other half who placed her rival on a throne, crowning her with silver in the hall of Winterfell.
“Queen Sansa’s gratitude earned me the right to ride away, rather than face the execution her vassals clamored for,” Jaime corrects, a wry smile twisting his features, changing his face into something strange and grotesque. “I did push her brother from a window, and her mother and brother died at our father’s word. There is little love left in the realm for Lannisters, it would seem.”
“We never concerned ourselves with love,” she snaps, and Jaime’s eyes drift back to Tommen. She curls her body around his, protective, shielding him from view, and nearly bares her teeth.
“We concerned ourselves too much with love,” Jaime argues, his voice low. As he reaches out to brush a tendril of hair from Tommen’s cheek, Cersei wonders when he drew so close.
“Do not touch him!” she cries out, voice suddenly shrill. “You left him as readily as you left me!” She can smell Jaime now that he is so close, that scent of sweat and metal and oak, the intoxicating aroma that reminds her of herself as readily as it reminds her of him. There had been moments, locked away awaiting trial, when she would swear the scent would waft through the bars of her cell and she would rush towards the light, to try and see if her heart cried true. Jaime, the wild flutter within her chest would tell her, Jaime has come for me at last.
That familiar scene – of Jaime, of herself, of home - would always pass on a breeze, and another would come to blow it away, taking her hopes along with it.
“I returned to you,” he reminds her, and he puts his hands – one of flesh and one of gold - on either side of her, resting on the arms of the throne. He should bleed, she thinks vindictively, and she remembers the first time she heard tale of Jaime’s slaying of the Mad King, how Ned Stark had happened upon her twin seated on the throne and had ordered him to stand. She had been so certain that Jaime had made a mistake in yielding. He had sat the throne and had not been cut to pieces, so in her mind, he belonged there. He should be the king, she had thought so long ago – petulantly, wistfully, longingly.
She had been a fool to think so, a love blind fool.
“Did you ever doubt I would?” he adds, and she wants to tell him yes, yes, I doubted you. She wants to recount those moments spent by a window too small, by light too dim and fleeting, waiting and waiting for the cell door to burst open and one of those damnable septas to rush in with the news that her brother had arrived. But though the handsome knight had never come for his queen, even when she had walked over hard cobblestones with her skin bared to the world, she had always thought him merely delayed. The idea that Jaime could have abandoned her to her fate had been unfathomable, and even as the Seven Kingdoms fell around her one by one, family after family bending the knee to the Dragon Queen, still she had waited for Jaime to arrive.
She had not doubted that he would come, that he would overcome any obstacle to reach her, and she would be waiting – angry and full of rebukes, but waiting still. She could not doubt him, cannot even now – to doubt Jaime is to doubt herself, and her unwavering faith in herself is all that Cersei has left to claim as her own.
“You think I should lay my crown at her feet then, brother?” she demands instead, evading the question. “Shall I beg Queen Daeneyrs for a pardon upon bended knee? Shall I help her up the stairs to sit upon my son’s throne?”
“I would never presume such a thing,” Jaime answers, and his hands, the left callused and the right cold, cup her face, and she flinches from his touch. It is not as I remember, and the mere thought of the change, of the loss, makes her sick. “Lions do not kneel. And even if they did, dragons do not forgive.” His lips curl up into a mockery of a smile, as though he has heard a jape he does not quite understand. “It is over, Cersei.”
(…the valonqar shall wrap his hands about your pale white throat and choke the life from you.)
It is over, she tells herself.
“Not for you,” she protests, bitter to the end for all that Jaime has that she does not, by mere accident of birth. It is not enough for him to have it all, not anymore. Perhaps not ever. “There is that ghastly beast from Tarth, your treasured companion. The northern queen. Our kinslaying monster of a brother is said to ride at the Dragon Queen’s side. There are those who will speak for you.” There are those who will speak for you, but none who will have a word for me.
His hands slip along her jawline, and she wants to bat the golden one away, so unyielding and icy. He leans closer and his eyes have not changed; after so many years and so much strife, they are still arrestingly green, and she can still see herself reflected in their depths (and him again, in her reflection). For a moment, she thinks he will kiss her, and for a moment she forgets all that has ruined them and pulled them apart, and wishes that he would close that little distance, so that they may be as one again.
He does not. “Perhaps,” he answers, sounding so unconcerned. Jaime had always been the cavalier one in their youth, unable to be serious, unable to understand the dangers of the things he did. “But I am here, am I not?”
“Yes,” Cersei answers, her heart clenching at the admission. “You are here.” You are where you belong, and so, in turn, am I.
It takes neither of them by surprise when his hands, gold and flesh, close about her throat. She had once thought, so long ago, that her imp brother would steal into her room at night to choke the life from her. Her greatest fear had been to be caught unawares in the vulnerability of sleep (vulnerability, truly that had been Cersei’s fear), to awaken to the sounds of her own death song filling the room.
She does not know when she stopped fearing that, only that she had, though the prophecy was never far from her mind, though it need nothing to stem her hate for the Imp. I have spent my life trying to avoid all that I have been rushing towards, she thinks, and when Jaime’s hands close upon her throat, she does not flinch away. Perhaps it is a kindness, no less than what I gave Tommen.
She grips the arms of the throne tighter, and Jaime pushes her against the back of the chair, his breath heavy and ragged and anxious as it brushes her cheeks. Beneath her palms she feels the cold blades break her skin, and she hopes she will leave a river of blood to greet the new regent.
“I am sorry,” Jaime says, his voice rough when she instinctively begins to struggle, as dots of black and red and gold – gold like the locks of their hair, like the riches of Casterly Rock, like the shrouds, the crowns and the shrouds of her poor babes – dance before her eyes. Her hand comes up to push against his chest, to try and drive him back, and she leaves a red handprint upon his armor, a battle mark made with her fingers splayed apart.
Red and gold, she thinks again, watching him. He is all the colors of home, the colors of their legacy, the colors that shall be remembered. He is all the colors of the lion (in a coat of red or a coat of gold…).
She gasps harshly, her nails like vices along his arms and pulling at his fingers clamped tight around her throat. But he holds her tight to his chest with his good hand, squeezing her shoulder with his arm wrapped around her back; it is his golden one that pushes her back, that cuts off her air, and from that hand there is no relief.
Tommen is heavy on her lap, impossibly heavy, and her arms feel heavier still, falling from clawing at Jaime’s grip upon her. He holds her throat, but it is her head that feels caught in a vice grip, the blood pounding in her ears, her temples aching like a dagger piercing into her skull.
Even as he apologizes again, his voice broken now, defeated (she had apologized to Tommen, as well, but had held him much more tenderly), Cersei fights back still. Her hands fall to his sides, and with a sudden vicious strength, she yanks his dagger from its sheath.
We shall leave this world as we entered it – together, she resolves, and Jaime does not even flinch away from her. She wonders if he has already decided the same, and so is resigned to what she will do; or if instead they have ended so far apart from one another that he can no longer read her thoughts, and she has truly caught him unawares. (A lion still has claws…)
But she wonders for only an instant before she summons her strength and plunges the dagger into his thigh, the easiest part of his skin for her to reach. He cries out in pain as she drags it along the length of his leg, and falls heavy against her and Tommen both, his golden hand hard and heavy against her throat, still crushing – more so, with the entirety of his weight behind it. Her arms are trapped between their bodies, and there shall be no more fighting.
She wants to laugh, as they lay there, entangled and dying both, with Tommen between them. The blood of her hands and the blood of his leg intermix, making them one in a way that had so long been denied to them.
Bringing Jaime home to her, at long last.
And what a fine gift we shall be for the Queen, Cersei thinks, imagining the tableau when the triumphant Targaryen rides into her capital, eager to sit upon her throne for the first time. What a sight that shall greet her.
It is the last thought Cersei knows, but it is enough. Somehow, it still feels like a victory.
(And mine are long and sharp, my lord, as long and sharp as yours.)